Just upgraded some RAM

128GB

16x8GB memory. Sure it’s not the newest, or greatest, but it’s nice to be able to right size the RAM on all my lab crap, and now have all kinds of extra RAM. The machine is built around SAS, but I don’t have the right sled adapter, and only a single disk. Although it really doesn’t matter as there is a really nice internal USB slot inside this Dell r710, and VMWare installs just fine onto it. I already had all my virtual machines on an external NAS so it really didn’t matter.

I’ll probably either get more sleds and SAS disks, or some kind of flash PCIE cards. I haven’t really decided yet.

It’s crazy to think of a time when 128kb was a lot of memory, let alone 1MB, or even a monstrous 16MB. It seemed crazy to hit that 24bit limit of the 286, then the 32bit limit of the 386.. At least we are a ways off from hitting the 64bit limit, but now that I have work servers with 1TB+ of RAM, well, it’s only a matter of time.

First hard disk I had was a broken 3rd hand Miniscribe MS-8425. The spindle would get stuck but if you opened it up and gave it a twirl, then applied power it’d work. The disk lasted me about 6 months, which is about 5 months longer than I had thought. At the time I was moving away from my beloved Commodore 64, to a 10Mhz 286 with 1MB of ram, and now an awesome 20MB fixed disk. I thought it was an incredible amount of storage, which I quickly ran out of. Stacker saved the day, but in the end the disk died, and I upgraded to some slightly better MFM disks. I didn’t get an IDE disk until much later, and they were so incredibly fast compared to the old MFM/RLL even with 1:1 interleaving.

I didn’t get 16MB of ram until 1993 or 1994. But by then I had this monstrous CDC/Seagate Wren ST4702N 94181-702 that was 760MB SCSI! I still had a 40MB & 100MB IDE disks, which I could balance the OS on the 100, swap on the 40, and data on the SCSI. I was lucky enough to have separate controllers for each disk, so Linux and NT didn’t seem so bad. Although I, like everyone else was already giving up on OS/2, especially with Windows NT 3.5’s super easy PPP dialer, and ‘big’ programs like Mosaic just working out of the box.

100’s of GB’s… I mean it’s crazy when you think that uncompressed a decade of usenet posts is only 10GB. Let that sink in, it took a decade of thousands on thousands of users to type in 10GB worth of ASCII. Now it’s something trivial to store. It’s partly why I always laugh at these ‘using windows 98 for my daily machine’ type posts. If you had a middle of the line machine form 1998, it wouldn’t be able to handle even the most basic tasks today, and you’d find it’s CPU incredibly overwhelmed with the simplest of web pages. Just as the storage requirements for programs today is so insanely huge compared to before. A Pentium 90, with 16MB of ram, and a 200MB disk would be ‘nice’ back then, but it’d be a joke. It may as well be a Commodore 64. But of course there is a tcpip stack for the c64, but other than simple 1970’s style stuff you aren’t doing anything with it.